Weapons of mass distraction
President Bush wouldn't want to talk about the many
issues which the Iraq crisis is obscuring
Observer Worldview
Dan Plesch
Sunday September 29, 2002
Just talking about invading Iraq has a very useful effect for
President Bush. It stops a public debate about his catastrophic
record as President. Indeed, had President Clinton or any
Democrat a similar record, impeachment would already be
underway.
Leave to one side President Bush's much discussed habit of
walking away from international agreements and his wilful
introduction of anarchy into international security. Take instead
what might be central Republican tests of this administration.
The President doing in the war on terrorism or the war on drugs?
He would be judged on the United States' economic
performance and the health of the stock market, and might be
expected to uphold the financial probity of US capitalism. Yet, in
all of these areas, the President's record is one of failure.
President Bush and his officials failed to give adequate priority to
Al Qaeda despite much advice that they should do so. In waging
the war on Afghanistan, they made several tactical blunders that
allowed the enemy leaders to escape. They have not yet
accounted for these errors.
The administration had plenty of advice about Al-Qaeda. In
January 2001, the outgoing National Security Advisor, Sandy
Berger, personally briefs Condeleeza Rice, his replacement, on
a plan to stop Al Qaeda. Rice merely starts a slow process of
policy review. Meanwhile various parts of the intelligence
community are pushing the ideas of attacks with aircraft and
terrorists engaging in flight training in the US.
These include the plan foiled by the French to fly a hijacked jet
into the Eiffel Tower and the plot in the Philippines to hijack 11
passenger planes simultaneously over the Pacific as well as the
now famous 'Phoenix memo' from an FBI agent warning of
terrorist flight training. In response to these pushes, there is no
equivalent 'pull' from the top of the administration looking for and
drawing in this intelligence. The US Congress decided last week
to appoint an independent commission looking into failures
leading up to 9/11. In my view, a Gore administration which had
failed to act would already have been drummed out of office.
In the war itself there were a number of significant operational
failures. There have now been numerous reports that, after the
launch of Operation Enduring Freedom, Bin Laden left Kabul for
Jallalabad and the mountains beyond as part of a group of
50-100 vehicles. The US military has expended vast sums of
money developing technology for tracking vehicles on the ground
from aircraft. This was first developed to tackle the Soviet armies
in Central Europe. The 'JSTARS' plane is the best known
technology in this area. These converted Boeing civilian airliners
are filled with radars and computers to operate the Joint
Surveillance and Target Acquisition Radar System. The generals
in command of this and other parallel systems appear to have
spectacularly failed to survey and acquire targets on one of the
main and highly visible routes in Afghanistan.
The attack in December on the redoubt at Tora Bora also
appears to have gone badly wrong. There have been numerous
reports detailing Al Qaeda leaders escaped through high
mountain passes. President Bush and his commanders
delegated the ground fighting to Afghan allies. Despite the
supposed hardheaded realism of the Bush team, they were
extremely naive in expecting that the Afghans would do an
effective job for them. The Administration decided not to deploy
US paratroopers or special forces to block the escape routes
from Tora Bora, even though there would have been strong public
support for their deployment.
In March, the US Army launched 2,000 men into an assault
against Al Qaeda's mountain positions near the town of Gardez.
The plan was leaked to the enemy - US forces were ambushed,
their Brigade HQ attacked, and US helicopters and planes were
unable to reinforce their own troops for two days due to the
intensity of enemy fire. There troops had been sent in by
overconfident commanders who had left their own artillery and
even sleeping bags behind. Eight were killed and 70 wounded
before the enemy slipped away. The death toll would have been
far higher save for the body armour that the soldiers now wear.
Having failed to give priority to tackling Al Qaeda and rejected
advice to do so, the Administration then failed twice to conduct
competent military operations against the Al Qaeda and Taliban
leadership.
Now let's look at the War on Drugs. Whatever you may think of
this War, it has for years been a top priority of US conservative
politicians. For years too, Afghanistan has been the main
source of supply around the world. Somehow and for whatever
reason the Taliban were able to reduce production by an order of
magnitude to hundreds rather than more than a thousand tons a
year. The Taliban had little money to offer, their military power
was mainly light weapons driven on a 4x4 backed by Islamic
principle and ruthlessness.
Now the international community has more than 10,000 troops
in the region and has pledged billions of dollars in aid.
Somehow, though this is not doing the job. According to
Drugscope, production is expected to reach 1,900 tons and the
UK and other Western countries will soon be flooded with cheap
heroin that will destroy many thousands of lives. It would appear
that although the US is now in a uniquely favourable position to
shut down production by a combination of cash and coercion,
President Bush has effectively chosen this moment to surrender
in the War on Drugs, without putting place any alternative policy
such as decriminalisation to help save his own people from jail
and destitution.
Turning to economic matters let's look at President Bush's
public and private economic policies. The President inherited a
projected budget surplus of $313 billion for 2002. Now, a deficit
of $157 billion is expected.
The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan warned in
September that "Returning to a fiscal climate of continuous large
deficits would risk returning to an era of high interest rates, low
levels of investment, and slower growth of productivity." One
reason for the deficit is that, with the recession, government
income from taxes has fallen. The other reason is that the
President gave away $1.3 trillion dollars in tax cuts. Middle
income tax payers got a few hundred dollars; the bulk of the
cuts went to the super-wealthy.
In addition, the military received
an additional $48 billion this year. Expect further rises in future.
The Washington NGO, 'Taxpayers for Common Sense' advised
that these sums would continue to grow: "given the inability of
the Pentagon to set priorities among the services and end
outmoded weapons programs and congressional pork barrel
tendencies, the pressure will continue to grow to exceed the
President's request."
So the President has by action and inaction undermined the
economy and hurt the livelihood of Americans and people around
the world, failed to prioritise hunting terrorists in advance of 9/11,
failed to ensure that the military action that was taken was
effective and surrendered in the war on drugs without having
another plan. This just leaves the question of his own and his
Vice President's potential financial misdeeds.
The Vice President, Dick Cheney, is now facing a civil law suit
for fraud from the NGO Judicial Watch. This alleges that the
Vice President and others inflated the earnings of Halliburton, a
company he ran, in order to raise the share price. The Vice
President has had a much lower public profile of late: he is said
to have spent much of the last six months hunkered down with
his lawyers preparing a defence.
The President himself has yet
to give satisfactory answers about his sale of shares in an oil
company for a large profit just ahead of bad news which would
have slashed their value. You may recall that President Clinton
had to face a government investigation from an independent
prosecutor for what became known as the Whitewater affair.
War fever has so far protected the present leadership from such
scrutiny - after all, this is not the time to weaken the
government.
Without Iraq, this and other issues would loom far larger on US
TV screens and perhaps negatively impact the President's
Republican Party in the elections for House and Senate that
take place this November. The election is very tight indeed,
especially in the Senate which the Democrats control by a
single vote. With a third of the seats up for election this year,
there are just eight marginal states, four leaning Democrat and
four Republican.
Now after this distraction, it's time to get back to those
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
· Dan Plesch is author of 'Sheriff and Outlaws in the Global
Village' and Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United
Services Institute (www.rusi.org. He writes a monthly online
commentary for Observer Worldview - you can read his previous
pieces here. Additional research by Avnish Patel.
Send us your views
You can contact the author at dplesch@rusi.org and send your
views to Observer site editor Sunder Katwala at
observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk with comments on articles or
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